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The Lighter Side - Page 4

TechTales

This one happened to me while
working at a university helpdesk. A user came into the office and asked if
someone could close a window for her. As I was nearest, I said "OK, lets have a
look and see whats wrong", thinking some app must have locked up. I followed her
into the computer room next door, where she sat down and carried on
working.

As everything seemed OK, I asked her what the problem was
exactly, to which she pointed at the open window across the room and said "its
cold in here".

Completely speechless now, I just made a few stammering
noises, and quickly left (without closing the window) before the stammering
turned to expletives.

I have a PhD. I know everthing.

There's
one of them at every college. The professor who has a PhD in 'underwater basket
weaving' but 'knows' everything about computers. I received a call from this
woman who fit this type. She simply wanted to forward her unversity email to her
ISP email account. I told her about a university website that has a form for
this. Well, she says she already did that, but it wasn't working. She then
begins to lecture me on the importance of her email and how it's my fault that
it isn't working. Not wanting to argue with a stubborn person, I simply
forwarded the information to one of the university's full-time all-knowing
techs.

The next day I ran into my supervisor and asked about this case.
He told me that he had contacted the professor's ISP and found out that she had
set forwarded email from that account to her university account. She had also
filled out our forwarding webpage a couple of times. Well, this created a nice
looping effect where the email kept getting bounced around. We fixed it for her,
but some people don't understand, once is enough sometimes.

Help Desk confusion

I worked the 'Help
Desk' for a university. In campus phone books and pamphlets, it's called the
"ITSS Help Desk" (Infomation Technology Systems and Service). Anyway, because
it's commonly referred to as simply the Help Desk, we would always get phone
calls for information not relative to our department. We would simply forward
the calls to the 'real' help desk or other departments

One time I got
this call from a woman who wanted to register for classes over the phone. I told
her the above and gave her the phone number for the Registration office. Five
minutes later she calls back and says that the Registration office told her to
call the "Help Desk". I immediately saw where this was heading. I told here
again our situation and gave her the campus wide information number. About 10
minutes later she calls me back and is surprised to here my voice. It seemed
that all the automated forwards gave her back to me. Oh joy. By this time the
women was rather beligerant. Not knowing what to do, I simply said to call back
tomorrow when someone else could help her.

After coming into work the
next day my co-worker told me this exact same story and how she got bitched out
before she hung up on her. Oh well.